Ben Southwood

There is a great pleasure in walking to and from a restaurant. I moved house recently and whereas Black Axe Mangal was the closest restaurant to my house before, the Hero of Maida is now just two or three minutes’ stroll from my front door.

The Hero of Maida is a gastropub – one of those rare things that Britain does well, both on its own terms and relative to the world. When people visit London I will often recommend them a diet composed at least half of gastropub meals.

This is especially true now that so many gastropub restaurants are self-consciously digging out the best of what can be found both buried under British soil and buried in British history. Even when the food is continentally influenced, it is the sort of continental influence that is part of the furniture over here.

We shared starters. One was a crab tart. The pastry was extremely delicate: it disintegrated at the lightest touch. It was topped with slices of greengage plum presented like pickles and with a similar influence: sweet and tart, surrounded with crunchy, subtley-aniseedy fennel, and held together with the warming sea floor flavour of crab.

The other starter was a tomato soup. It was essentially the same as one from a can albeit somewhat nicer: creamy, slightly spicy, and, yes, tomatoey. It came with a lovely swirl of olive oil, and it was served in a lion’s head dish. At this point we realised that we didn’t have bread and other tables did. Were we supposed to have bread? I never found out.

Main 1 was a big solid lump of bavette steak with cafe de Paris butter, but a much chunkier cafe de Paris than you get at Relais de Venise. Tender but with a little bite (as you expect from bavette), meaty: yes it was a steak. You couldn’t fault them, even compared to Blacklock or Flat Iron, since it was a decently hefty piece and cooked rather well, plus tastier and beefier than most.

It came with the sort of chips my dining companion likes best: triple cooked and fat so they’re extremely brown and crispy on the outside but still contain a considerable amount of potato innards. Fluffy at best, floury at worst. And they brought us ketchup and mayo without asking.

My main was in many ways better. Browned discs of confit lamb breast, the most giving and forgiving of meat cuts. You can do just about anything with it and it’ll turn out well – as my experiments at home have shown. This time it was fall-apart tender, like confit duck or smoked pulled pork, yet still identifiably meat and with some remaining spiral structure and bite.

It was extremely fatty, but that was well balanced by the soft chickpeas it came with. The only issue with this dish was a slight excess of salt. When the lamb is bacony salty, the first bite is amazing, but by the end you are looking for some relief. Still, it was a very enjoyable dish despite a slight over seasoning.

Pudding for me was the slightly silly choice of three individual scoops of ice cream. The first was an incredible world beater white peach sorbet. How do they do it? The best I’ve ever had. I wish I had tried their other sorbet flavours. The others were regular ice cream: malt, and almond. Both were very pleasant.

I hoovered up these plus half of the other dessert – a fabulous financier, which had a crumb so moist I really did want to ask them for their recipe, along with a reassuringly and satisfyingly crispy crust. In it was embedded a few raspberries, and it came with yet another scoop of ice cream, this time an acceptable vanilla.

A lovely meal, and one I would have no trouble giving one medal. But in a miraculous and generous turn of events, we were informed that it was half off the entire bill in August, despite the fact it was the tenth of September, and despite how clearly unaware we were of this deal. Our waiter almost pressed the unexpected £50 donation into our hands. What lovely folks.

Rating: One medal.

I used to live right by the Compton Arms, but in 33 months I never once went there. And yet, in the three weeks since I moved flat, I’ve been there four times.

One reason is that the once-crusty regulars pub has been taken over by hipster millennials, and revamped. In: morello cherry goses, revolving IPAs on tap, and a fridge of Belgian sours. Out: your reassuring range of standard pub lagers.

Apparently, this caused a revolt among the pub’s oldest and most loyal supporters – and Fosters has returned to the tap lineup – except now the edited custom Fosters label reads ‘Compromise’.

Another reason is that I had been told by several people that Four Legs, now in residence Tuesdays to Sundays, does one of if not the best burger in London. This is the sort of recommendation that I cannot overlook.

Clearly unsatisfied with the plaudits they’ve earned for their burgers, Four Legs have branched out pretty widely. We couldn’t resist eating a full dinner, starting with the quail.

The quail was piled ridiculously high with truffle shavings, and to our surprise came bone in. I’m not certain that truffle added to this hugely, but then again I am almost always happy to eat truffle, especially at these prices, and the pieces of bird were battered and fried with a great deal of competence. A very pleasant dish.

Next came their take on a Thai green papaya salad. For me, this one didn’t really work: it somehow tasted a bit bland. I think it needed some more fish sauce and some more lime, and perhaps a little bit of sugar.

The leeks were essentially perfect. They came heavy and silky soft, and served on a solid lake of ‘curds’ – not the squeaky squares we were expecting, but a substance more like a mix of creamy burrata and tangy greek yoghurt. And the whole lot was drizzled with grassy olive oil, sprinkled with black pepper, and served with bread.

In a London where good sourdough bread comes by and large as standard this still stood out as particularly moist and dense, like they had implausibly managed to cook it themselves in the tiny pub kitchen alongside everything else.

Ultimately this is all preamble. This restaurant, at least in its current incarnation, is going to live and die on the strength of its burger. So I’m very pleased to be able to announce that the burger is very good, definitely in the top 10 for London and potentially in the top 5.

They get all the important things right. No fancy sauces, no fancy toppings. The onions are chopped so they don’t make it difficult to eat (like the insane practice of serving whole rings). There is no lettuce or tomatoes and the cheese is good honest American non-cheese.

The bun, despite being a brioche, is soft and lightly chewy, and does not have any trouble maintaining coherence in the face of the burger’s juice, grease, and liquid cheese onslaught. The patty itself was roughly average in heft, charred well on the outside, and moist, partly because it was so consistently cheesed and sauced.

Best of all, it comes with essentially an entire layer of finely sliced pickles, and the pickles are clearly homemade: very sharp and piquant, and much sweeter than the overly healthy ones you get in McDonalds.

Basically this is a good burger, from people who agree with me on all the essential points of what makes a burger good. The only issue I have with it is that it was served fully cooked through. However I know that many councils won’t let them serve their burgers pink, so it’s entirely possible that this is somebody else’s fault, not theirs.

Even hampered by the nanny state, Four Legs serve a rather pleasant meal for not much money at all (we spent about £40 on food and about £20 on two rounds of pints). And above all, they are the first restaurant I’ve ever been to that serves nice normal food and a genuinely good burger at the same time. If you’re nearby, go check it out.

Rating: One medal.

To get the first half of the review out of the way immediately: Beer + Burger Store is an excellent beer store. They serve a wide range of beers I’d like to drink, from milkshake IPAs to kettle sours, to spontaneous fermentations; and a wide range I’m less interested in but appreciate the existence of.

Many of the bottles and tins are expensive, but my willingness to pay for novel beer is almost unlimited and my depth of experiences buying online tell me that this isn’t driven by B+B’s mark-up.

But this is a restaurant review website, and while the quality of drinks will often tilt the scale in one direction or another, the strength of my recommendation will always depend mostly on the strength of the food offering. After all, there is a hipster bottle shop, beer bar, or taproom in almost every neighbourhood now, and while this is one of the better ones in Dalston/Haggerston, my absolute favourite nearby would be Seven Seasons on Hoxton Street. If we’re talking pure beer.

Weirdly enough, I ate B+B’s burgers twice last weekend. We were sitting in Highbury Fields on Saturday afternoon and it came up on Deliveroo. Their Deliveroo was pretty good, but it didn’t feel fair reviewing them on the basis of food that had by necessity rested at least half an hour when I ate it. It just so happened that I was in Haggerston that Sunday as well, and I thought why not go back and see what the real version is like.

The short answer is that their burgers are decent, but that decent burgers are par for the course in London now. Back in 2014 I could list every single good burger that London offered; London burgers were so scarce that we queued an hour for the opening of Shake Shack. Now people have learned how to make burgers good, and, presuming there is no Bleecker Burger nearby, there are at least ten places I’d be happy to walk into almost any day.

Beer + Burger Store make smashed burgers, like Shake Shack, but with far more commitment to the concept. Their bizarrely undersold ‘double cheeseburger’ is actually a triple: three smashed down, darkly caramelised, and crisped up patties, thicker than you’d expect, and slathered in American cheese, with a huge number of pickles.

The pickles are a highlight: clearly homemade, particularly excellent, and generously portioned – you get something like 20 little slices. The buns are also a highlight: incredibly soft, chewy, and yielding, and able to take any amount of grease and sauce thrown at them, unlike the fluffy brioche you are often given, which gives up without the slightest fight.

The patties should be another highlight: I love the way they are cooked on the outside, and the surprising heft means you occasionally see a tantalising glimpse of pink or purple. But the beef ends up tasting bland and grey – I think this is due both to significant underseasoning and excessively lean meat going into the mince.

The best burgers require nothing but cheese, onions, and maybe pickles, and all of these merely highlight the beefiness that should be the focus of the dish. Here I found myself adding ketchup to get myself through.

Some of the other options were stronger. The chicken burger was one of the best I’ve had: clearly brined to the proper juicy texture, with soft chewy bun perfectly complimenting the bone dry crunchy batter. I have the greatest admiration for how they offer dipping gravy – how much better it is than ketchup or mayo for chips, or even for your burger itself.

In some ways this is an unfairly negative review. In 2013 Beer + Burger Store would probably have ranked among my favourite burger joints in London. I probably would have featured it on lists of London’s best burgers, and regularly sent my friends there to sample its wares. But it’s the current year, and in the current year the quality of burgers in London is so high as to make B+B just another decent burger joint.

(No medals.)

There are endless “best restaurant in London” lists, but in our (Sam Bowman’s & Ben Southwood’s) view nearly all of them are rubbish. They’re too expensive and tend to focus on things other than food like service, ambience and image. These things are all important, but with Straight Up London, we have tried to create a guide to where a normal person should eat because the food tastes good for the price you pay. That doesn’t mean they’re all cheap, but the ones that aren’t are really, truly worth it. There are lots of places we recommend, and far more that we don’t recommend, but here are the places we adore and return to time after time. This, in no particular order, is our list of the absolute creme de la creme, the must-visit places London has to offer, and why we keep going back to them.

1. Som Saa, Spitalfields

Som Saa’s Thai food is outstanding, as good or better than most of the best food in Thailand with the punchy flavours that make Thai food so good. The deep fried whole sea bass, piled high with herbs and toasted rice, is a joy to pick apart with your hands, and the rest of the menu is updated frequently. Not every dish works, but that’s a testament to the constant experimentation and innovation that goes on in the kitchen, which explains why Som Saa is still at the top of its game. Even the cocktails are good – the Dragon’s Milk, made with sticky rice rum and coconut cream, is one of the best I’ve had anywhere.—SB

2. Bleecker Street, Victoria

Everybody likes hamburgers. Bleecker make easily the best burgers in town, even when ridiculous council restrictions stop them offering their signature Bleecker black, where the two unbelievably juicy patties sandwich a slab of soft Clonakilty black pudding. There may well be some burger, somewhere, that is even better, but I find it hard to believe. I have eaten dozens and yet I am still thinking, writing this, of how I can somehow engineer getting one at some point today. They’re that good.—BS

3. Silk Road, Camberwell

Nowhere else in London is like Silk Road – an unassuming, dingy-looking place from the outside, Silk Road is a family-run restaurant specialising in food from the Xinjiang province of China, where central Asian and Muslim influences make the food totally unlike the Cantonese that most of us are used to. Chili, cumin and salt are the key flavours here, best shown off in the lamb skewers with molten cubes of fat and meat cooked over hot coals. The hand-pulled noodles are excellent, as are the ‘home style’ cabbage and aubergine dishes that bring rich meatiness to otherwise-boring vegetables. Best of all are the prices, which are low enough to let you experiment without too much danger, and especially the £2.60 Tsingtao beers – an offer I just can’t refuse.—SB

4. Smokestak, Shoreditch

Barbecue in London has never really taken off. Yes, you can eat solid, decent smoked meat from one of Bodeans’s efficiently-distributed outlets. But the upper end of the market has struggled: Shotgun closed down and Pitt Cue decided to stop offering the low and slow experiments that made them such a success initially. So Smokestak is one of a kind, offering both glorious staples like slices of juicy brisket and genius innovations like smoked girolles on dripping-drenched toast. The sheer depth of their cooking talent means they even do well when they try their hand at zingy, fresh raw fish dishes and baked potatoes slathered in rarebit.—BS

5. Blacklock, Soho

The number one request we get is to recommend a meat place that isn’t insanely expensive. I always say Blacklock and every single time I get a text afterwards saying it was amazing. Not only is it the best place in London to get a steak, it is also the best place to get a pork or lamb chop. What’s more, you can get all of these things at the same time for £20, which is before you even consider the dripping trencher—a slab of focaccia-esque bread on which they pile all of the chops. There is almost literally nothing better than bread heavy with the juices of wood-grilled meat. I won’t be satisfied until there is a Blacklock in every neighbourhood of the UK.—BS

6. Good Friend Chicken, Soho

There’s not much more to say than this: Good Friend chicken, located just beside Leicester Square, will sell you a frisbee-sized piece of chicken breast, hammered flat, breaded and deep fried, for £6. The popcorn chicken – which really just increases the surface area at the expense of less moist, juicy chicken – is good too, and a steal at £3 a bag. They’ll also shake your choice of flavour powders on top to give an extra little kick – I have been at least a dozen times and still haven’t tried all the different combinations, but right now Thai flavouring plus salt and pepper is my combo of choice. The chili plus numbing sichuan pepper is a favourite, too.—SB

7. Santana Grill, Victoria

Mexican food still isn’t really a Thing in London, as indicated by the fact that clearly the best place around is a street food stall in Westminster, of all places, that is only open on weekday lunchtimes. Yes, you can get a peerless burrito with familiar stuff like cochinita pibil. But it is in the rare or off-menu offerings that Santana really excels: chilorio—pork confited in chile and lard served with pickled onions, smoked chicken tacos, or, best of all, the “bronut”. The bronut is a genius innovation where a regular jam doughnut is sliced open and filled with pulled brisket. It sounded like a bad idea to me at first, but that was until I tasted it.—BS

8. Kanada-Ya, Soho

Until I went to Kanada-Ya, I didn’t really understand why everyone was so het up about ramen. It’s just noodle soup, I thought. Now I understand what the fuss is all about: unbelievably creamy and strongly-flavoured pork broth, alkaline noodles with some bouncy al dente bite, slices of tender and meaty pork, and all the other accoutrements that balance each other perfectly. What’s more, ramen is a paradigmatic example, like pizza, of a food it just doesn’t make sense to ever make at home—it only makes sense at scale. It’s literally impossible to make a bowl of ramen nearly as good as Kanada-Ya offer for a price even approaching the generous £10.50 they’ll give you one for.—BS

9. A Wong, Victoria

Where Silk Road is a homely soul food restaurant offering big bold flavours and generous portions for a pittance, A Wong is a delicate high end specialist trying to push the boundaries and hone down classics into works of art. At lunch they offer only dim sum with whimsical designs—the fried rabbit dumpling is an orange and green carrot, and the sweet duck yolk dessert could be mistaken for a satsuma. At dinner, they have dishes from across China: crispy chilli beef, sweet and sour chicken, fish fragrant aubergine, and tea eggs whose yolk you will cut up and burst into a waiting nest of filo. In every case gloop is refined to cutting sweetness, grease to soothing fat and stodge to firm savoury satisfyingness. It shows you why these dishes spread so much in the first place.—BS

10. Kricket, Soho

The words “small plates” usually make my heart sink. Too little food shared between too many people, like butter spread over too much bread. But Kricket makes it work, using the opportunity to innovate with wonderful Indian dishes that, if you could only try one, would make you and your friends all jealous of each other’s dishes all night. I regularly find myself craving the bhel puri – a street snack of puffed rice and vegetables mixed with chutney and yoghurt – and the tandoori monkfish was one of the best pieces of fish I’ve ever had.—SB

11. The Dairy, Clapham

Modern European tasting menus can be great, but they can also be prissy, pretentious and a bit staid. Plus, they are always incredibly expensive. I would recommend The Dairy over any of the pricier higher-end tablecloth meals I have been to, as good as they were—it exemplifies what this sort of cuisine can be. Every dish is a surprising and exciting delight, and you hope again and again that you’ve miscounted and they’re going to bring you an extra course you forgot about. The best dish I had here was a truffled brie on toast with honey, but nearly everything manages to combine a new experience with easy deliciousness. What’s more, the seven course tasting menu is still only £48.—BS

12. Coal Rooms, Peckham

One of the newest restaurants on this list, the Coal Rooms occupies the old ticket office at Peckham Rye train station, with one of the rooms turned into a giant charcoal fire pit for roasting meat that, if you’re lucky, you can be seated around. The menu changes frequently and usually features ingredients and combinations I’ve never seen anywhere else – goat belly char siu, beef brisket Russian salad (has to be tried – so much better than it sounds), and the “Peckham Fatboy”, a giant potato croquette covered with melted raclette cheese and mayonnaise. Don’t be too distracted by the wackier-sounding dishes on offer – the grilled meat is superb too, and usually comes in the form of one enormous chop to share. It sounds strange, but make sure you check out the bathrooms – they’ve turned the old station bathrooms into a glorious palace, unlike any I’ve ever seen.—SB

13. Knife, Clapham

Perhaps we shouldn’t, when reviewing a steak restaurant with access to the most sought-after beef in the country, home in on Yorkshire puddings. But the fact that Knife gift you a large and entirely unheralded plate of Yorkshires inbetween your starters and main course highlights exactly why it’s such a nice place to eat. Yes, the beef is fantastic, yes the bread is hot from the oven and fancy little rolls rather than the omnipresent sourdough slices, yes there is wonderful gravy, and yes their sides are almost universally great. But it’s the little things like the unprompted doggy swan made out of aluminium foil for my precious leftover food that make me want to go back all the time, even just to hang out there.—BS

14. KOI Ramen, Brixton

If Kanada-ya is my head’s favourite ramen, KOI is my heart’s. I couldn’t believe that this tiny stall in Pop Brixton could make such a rich tonkotsu broth when I first tried it (and loved it so much that I ordered an entire bowl, straight after the pizza that was supposed to be my dinner). And I still can’t believe it now that it’s expanded to Tooting and Brick Lane and kept that high standard up. It’s a near-perfect bowl of fatty meaty goodness, and for only £6.50 it feels like I’m getting away with daylight robbery every time.—SB

15. Apollo Banana Leaf, Tooting

What makes Apollo Banana Leaf, Tooting’s best Sri Lankan restaurant, so good? It’s not the dry fried spicy mutton or the creamy, spicy aubergine curry, or even the chunky £1 mutton rolls. It’s not even the Paneer or Chicken “65”, flourescent pink nuggets of crispy fried protein that I can’t help but wolf down as soon as they arrive at the table. It’s because I know I can rely on it when I want to show off to my friends what really makes me tick, food-wise – affordable, interesting, fun and above all delicious food that you just can’t get anywhere else.—SB

16. Hélène Darroze at the Connaught

Of all the restaurants on the list, this is the fanciest and the priciest. If you go for dinner, it’s going to be at least £100 for food, and the cheapest wine on the menu is around £50 a bottle—it goes far, far higher. But sometimes you get what you pay for, not just in exquisite service and an incredibly beautiful old world dining room. Their chicken consomme tasted like an entire chicken compressed into a tiny, amazingly clear little dose of broth. Of course, nothing I had there will still be on the menu, but their range of skill—from confit chicken leg “tacos” to palate-cleansing apple soups means that I trust them to do anything well.—BS

17. Umut 2000, Dalston

There are hundreds of shiny metal charcoal grills in London, all offering an ostensibly similar menu of meat skewers with meze and flatbreads. Very few of them are places where you can’t get a decent meal for a decent price. But Umut 2000 (apparently Umut is a Turkish first name meaning hope) is the decentest of the lot. For £30 you can get a truly ginormous plate of chicken and lamb of various types, with unlimited warm tangy bread, and a huge plate of meze. Despite some very credible attempts, I have never managed to finish this between two, or even three, and despite the sheer quantity I have never encountered a single dry, tough, or bland piece of meat.—BS

18. Chick ‘n’ Sours, Haggerston

For something as simple as fried chicken it’s amazingly difficult to get right. Everywhere either overcooks it to a dry husk, tries to dress it up some flavourless meat with “fancy” flavourings and sides, or, worst and most common of all, gives you something swimming in grease that resembles something like what you’d get at a Morley’s at 2 o’clock in the morning. Not Chick ‘n’ Sours, though. I don’t know how they do it, but their chicken is not greasy at all, it’s just succulent and moist and actually tastes of something by itself. The dips are unintrusive – though I maintain that their St Agur blue cheese and buttermilk dip is one of the best things to have with chicken and chips, anywhere – and unusual sides like fish fragrant aubergine, pickled watermelon and kimchi nachos make every part of the meal a pleasure. In my experience the Haggerston branch is considerably better than the Covent Garden one, though, including when the Haggerston people did a residency in Brixton, so consider this an endorsement of that one only.—SB

19. Smoke & Salt, Brixton

Smoke and Salt’s “concept” – emphasising traditional techniques in things like curing and pickling – might sound faddish, but don’t let that put you off. This little place, occupying a little shipping container in Pop Brixton, is a testament to what a few talented chefs can do with discipline and a willingness to take risks with classic ingredients. Most dishes are far more than the sum of their parts – crispy new potatoes with gorgonzola, chimichurri and beef could hardly be bad, but somehow they make it shine, and make you wish that every other fried potato dish was just like it. Charred coley was cooked to perfection, a perfect example of how to cook fish without letting it become dry or textureless. The food is inexpensive and the menu changes seasonally, and while not every dish works, you’ll prefer Smoke and Salt’s noble failures to most restaurants’ successes.—SB

20. Lahore Karahi, Tooting

Two Indian-subcontinent restaurants within five minutes of each other on Tooting High Street might seem like overkill. But Lahore Karahi’s curries are the perfect compliment to Apollo Banana Leaf’s more unconventional dishes, and my favourite place for “traditional” Indo-Pakistani food in London. Grilled meats, like the fenugreek and chicken seekh kebab or the lamb chops, explode with flavour, and the house curries are simply far, far better than their equivalents at other curry houses. It’s cheap, it’s cheerful, and to dine in it’s most definitely unglamorous – but it’s also the best curry in London I’ve had.—SB

21. Peckham Bazaar, Peckham

Think of “balkan” food and you’ll probably either think of stodgy Greek stuff like moussaka or, worse, huge slabs of overcooked meat and boiled vegetables, Serbian-style. That’s unfair, and nothing will shatter that prejudice like a trip to Peckham Bazaar. If you go in the spring or summer, you’ll likely get something like grilled marinated octopus (non-rubbery, naturally) and prawns, or halibut kebabs, alongside courgette fritters. Go in the autumn or winter and slow-roasted meats will be on offer. The team here are true masters of their craft, creating new dishes daily according to what’s fresh and delicious, showing off obscure spices and vegetables from the Eastern Mediterranean and cooking their ingredients to perfection. Not only have I never had a bad meal here, I’ve never had a bad dish here.—SB

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The problem with going out for restaurants is that once you’ve paid for drinks, service, and a few courses you’ve usually spent £50. That’s a fair amount of money for almost anyone. But one thing London has done increasingly well in the five or so years I’ve been living in and around the centre is street food, and street food markets, where lots of vendors gang together and you can sometimes eat well for under £10.

Oftentimes these trucks and stalls will find themselves building enough hype and popularity to eventually open a proper restaurant—like how the Meatwagon turned into MeatMission, MeatLiquor and MeatMarket. They will expand their menus, serve you drinks, charge you service, and so on, but there is something very enjoyable about the raggedy streamlined simplification you get with a good honest food cart.

Last Sunday I went to the Sunday market in Victoria Park (a lovely walk down the canal) and I was surprised just how many great options they have, almost none of which I’d heard of, despite how voraciously I consume info about new popups, stalls, and openings. I ate solid fried chicken tenders, a surprisingly good take on a burger, and was forced out of a sheer fullness to miss out on several other options I would happily have tried any other day.

This is a restaurant review blog, and while I will extend that to street traders, I don’t think other vendors count. So I’ll just mention as an aside that I also bought some incredible chorizo & morcilla, and perhaps the best balsamic vinegar I’ve ever tasted.

Mexican Fried Chicken

I think possibly this stall wants for a more googleable name, but their food offering is already excellent. The good: bone-dry, super rock-hard-crispy coating around juicy, tender (clearly brined) chicken tenders, and you get a solid pile for £8. What’s more, it’s drizzled in chipotle mayo (smoky, savoury and slightly sweet) and sprinkled in chilli powder.

The okay but not amazing: the pico de gallo side lacked a little bit of freshness and zingyness; it was a bit flat. And more than that, it was just hard to combine with either the (decent) skin-on fries that sat under the chicken, or the chicken pieces itself. I think if you were going to have smaller pieces in a taco or a bun or something it’d make sense, but it was pointless in this form. Sadly they’d run out of guac (they were extremely popular while we were there) so we didn’t get to try that.

Rating: One medal.

The Patate

I tried The Patate out of pure curiosity, and thought it was a high risk idea. What they do is slow cook boeuf bourgignon, presumably the day before, and bring it along in a giant Le Creuset. When you want a “burger” they press it into something vaguely resembling a patty, grill it up so the sides are browned, cover it in a fat slab or two of cheese (in our case Raclette, but they also offer Camembert and a blue cheese), and serve it in a brioche bun.

When it comes to hamburgers I am a purist. Yes, you can experiment, but 99% of the time your experiment is going to turn out much worse than simply serving a piece of fatty beef mince with American cheese and some pickles. In fact, many of the London burger joints with the most airs and graces fall, in my mind, short of what you can get at McDonalds or Shake Shack—not to mention the really off-the-wall attempts in fancy restaurants.

But I was really surprised not just at how good this version is, but how much it actually tastes like a regular hamburger despite all the translated differences. Deeply beefy, with a mild cheese made for melting that spreads its lubrication and flavour around, and a no-frills mayo-based sauce. Very good stuff.

Their chips were even better, deeply imbued with seasoning to a degree that puts many other attempts to shame, and once again served with a generous covering of melted Raclette (if you enjoy cheese pulls then this is for you). It may not look like that much food, but on reflection it shouldn’t have shocked me so much that something this fat and protein dense was so filling.

Rating: One medal.

Maybe I was just lucky with my choices, but based on the reliability of my gut for judging culinary books by their covers, I’d say that Victoria Park Market offers even greater riches that those I sampled. Highly recommended—I will be back myself very soon.

Why is it so hard for restaurants to expand? So often do I have a meal at the second or third branch of a chain and find it lacklustre or not up to the standards I built up in my mind. And yesterday’s meal at Zelman Meats in St. Paul’s, the fourth branch of the proto-chain, was yet another case where the latest outpost of a restaurant brand did not impress me.

First, I’ll be clear that I really like and endorse what the whole group around Zelman is doing. I’ve never been to Goodman, and given that Knife in Clapham has the same hard-to-get meat supplier and costs half the price, I probably never will go, but it seems like what you want from a high-end steakhouse. I loved Rex & Mariano and when it was cruelly taken from us, I was a fan of its replacement, the original Zelman Meats in Soho. London needs more steak restaurants that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Basically, this restaurant group has its heart in the right place, and often delivers the goods.

And if Zelman Meats’s city branch was a cheap and cheerful Flat Iron affair, I’d probably be recommending it heartily. But if you’re going to spend at least £100 on dinner and drinks between two, you expect something special, at least if you’re me, and special is what Zelman didn’t deliver.

Look, maybe tempura does technically include any type of batter, I am no expert, but what I am expecting when I am offered tempura prawns is the gloriously light-coloured and light-textured batter familiar to all who have had it once. This was more like beer batter. Beer-battered prawns are a perfectly good thing, although these were slightly overcooked, but it is always frustrating when you don’t get what you expect.

As usual, the “holy fuck” mayo was basically just orange mayo, and I would have preferred that the lime flavour was in there, as wetting the batter with the lime segments sacrifices some of its crunch, and never gives you the distribution of flavour as you’re hoping for.

The burrata was a bit better. Smaller than the gigantic lumps you’re used to, but cheaper too, and that’s probably an overall better trade. I’d say it was considerably less wet and creamy, and therefore more like regular mozzarella than I’ve had before, but it did the job. The only real problem was a severe lack of the promised pesto (you can barely see it in the picture)—just a smearing underneath. Give us a bit more and let us decide if we want it all!

The chips ranged from excellent to completely undercooked. As ever, the parmesan and black truffle topping is a great idea, but I had an unshakeable sense that it was less truffly than I remembered. Obviously in a dish like this I don’t expect big thick shavings onto my plate—I’m only paying £8.50—but this had a great truffle smell without much of a discernible truffle taste. Maybe it was the end of a jar.

On the other hand, both sauces—béarnaise and chimichurri—were great. The chimichurri was a bit different to what I am used to (mainly because it was blended) but I found myself dipping and dipping till it was all gone.

But I’ve gone all this time without talking about what you came for, the steak. Now the good is that you buy per 100g—chateaubriand is £9.50/100g, and picanha is £6.50. That above is 300g of each, which is about enough for two people.

The steak was not bad. But we paid nearly £50; for that, it needed to be excellent—it needed to be worth five flat iron steaks from Flat Iron! And it just wasn’t.

Firstly, it was cooked inconsistently. There were big veins of grey “gradient” in the chateaubriand (left) around the nice medium rare parts, and the two end pieces were grey, tough, and grainy. Even if you are committed to grilling your steak from start to finish, there is no need for this, and if you are willing to cook the middle and the outside separately you can get perfect end to end medium rare every time. I can do it myself!

And secondly, it lacked flavour. Yes, we had sauces, but good steak tastes really good on its own. Chateaubriand is £25/kg (vs Zelman’s £95/kg) in Turner & George, the best butcher near me, and tastes really beefy. Obviously I do not object to restaurants charging more for food—they prepare it for me—but they are not adding anything close to £70 of value. Or they weren’t yesterday.

And so I left Zelman having had some decent, adequate stuff, but spending £42 a head for two courses without so much as a sip of booze. That’s not big bucks but it’s still a decent chunk of change for a not at all extravagant lunch! To go back to Knife, my bill there was just a little more and I drank a bottle of wine, ate three courses, snacks, bread, and much more. So yes, I was more than a little disappointed.

Rating: No medals.